


Firecracker

by perfectpro



Series: Matchmaker [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:56:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5093276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erica catches his eye and promptly frowns at him, inclining her head. When Stiles follows where she’s looking to, he sees a redheaded woman standing against the wall searching for somewhere to sit. The tables that were free only a moment ago have suddenly filled up, and it looks like he’s the only one with a free seat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firecracker

**Author's Note:**

> I saw [this](http://www.buzzfeed.com/morganshanahan/this-instagram-account-is-literally-your-mother#.oaoVdo1J2Q) yesterday, and since then I haven't been able to get the idea out of my head! I know Lydia and her mom aren't Jewish, but I couldn't resist.

A pen spinning in hand, Stiles tries to figure out the crossword puzzle in front of him. Twenty seven down is an eleven letter synonym for ‘live wire’ and ‘bomb’. Some days, he’s able to blow through the daily crossword in thirty minutes and finish it with his coffee, but today he’s run into a few obstacles. So he’s been in the coffee shop for near an hour, and he’s barely halfway done with the clues. 

It’s a different crowd coming in now. He likes to come in the morning, around eight thirty, after the businessmen and women have made it to work and before the college students taking summer classes start coming in before their classes. It’s his favorite part of the summer, waking up and watching the population of Beacon Hills ebb and flow through the Starbucks as he tries to keep his mind sharp. (Crosswords totally count as an intellectual exercise, those and Sudoku are how he keeps from losing his touch during the break.)

He likes Beacon Hills. Not that he really lives here, of course, but his dad does, and his dad likes it, which means that Stiles likes it by default. Probably best that they moved right before he went to college, really. Stiles had been worried about how his dad would be living alone in the house with only memories of his late wife to keep him company. Now, that’s not as much of a concern, and Stiles can rest easy knowing that his dad has something to keep himself occupied besides calling Stiles three times a day and making sure that he’s studying.

Now, Stiles is the one who calls most often. Just to check in and make sure that the Sheriff is keeping his vegetable intake up to par and staying away from fried foods. (And if he introduced himself to the cooks in the nearby diner their first week in town to bribe them from letting his dad order anything with too heavy a fat content, no one needs to know.) And he’s happy to see, since he’s been back in town, that the cooks have not only kept their word but have passed the message along to new hires. The new hires, for some unknown reason that delights him to no end, always look slightly wary of him and take his order with fear in their eyes.

All in all, Beacon Hills isn’t a bad town. Granted, he’s only spent two summers here, but, again, his dad likes it. Plus, Erica, the barista he sees the most often, always remembers his order and usually has it waiting on the counter by the time he gets to the front of the line, two pumps of caramel in it like he always asks for.

That and the fact that the diner makes kick ass curly fries have him convinced that Beacon Hills is a pretty great place to readjust to normal life. No deadlines, no finals, no pretentious professors staring him down over the papers he’s stayed up until four am the night before over. He loves Yale, but whoever came up with the idea of finals week deserves their own special circle of Hell. Hell week is so aptly named.

“Might have to move some of your stuff, we’re about to have another rush,” Erica advises him, wiping down the table next to him. 

Stiles takes a second to look around before glancing disbelievingly at her. The place is in a lull, the only customers are him and a couple in the corner, the enemies-turned-to-sweethearts look about them clear from how the girl stiffens momentarily when the guy goes to flick some whip cream on her face. There’s a moment of silence as he looks at them, before they both burst into laughter. Every other table is empty. “But there’s no one here,” he protests.

Nodding wisely at him, she sets down a napkin holder and pushes a chair back in. “The calm before the storm.” With that, she moves to the other side of the store, saying in a good-humored voice to the boy at the other table, “Better get a move on if you don’t want to miss practice, Liam. Finstock will make you do suicides if you’re late.”

The boy’s eyes widen comically before he’s packing his stuff and tugging his girlfriend’s hand out the door.

Stifling a laugh, Stiles casts a glance at his books on the chair across from him before going back to his crossword. The drive-through isn’t even busy, so he’s willing to bet there’s time to spare before the store gets busy enough for him to worry.

-x-

As it turns out, ‘time to spare’ is really only ten minutes before there’s a line out the door and people are crowding around the counter as Erica wrestles with the expresso machine and takes orders. Stiles still isn’t worried about the extra chair at his table, though. It’s a two person table, and he’s occupying one seat and taking over the entire table surface with his newspaper and mug of now-cold coffee. Besides, there are still a couple free tables.

He’s moved on from clue twenty-seven, because hopefully he’ll be able to fill it in after getting a few more words done. Something’s off though, because he never has this much trouble with clues. And it doesn’t even seem hard, but the blank spaces in his puzzle seem to contradict that thought. Absentmindedly, he taps the cap of his pen against his lips and considers how long he’ll have to wait in line before getting another coffee and whether it’s worth it. It’s nearing eleven, so he should probably switch to decaf or else he’ll be jittery well into the afternoon.

Erica catches his eye and promptly frowns at him, inclining her head. When Stiles follows where she’s looking to, he sees a redheaded woman standing against the wall searching for somewhere to sit. The tables that were free only a moment ago have suddenly filled up, and it looks like he’s the only one with a free seat. 

He looks back to Erica and arches an eyebrow, because he needs the table space. He spreads out to do the crossword, it’s his process, and she knows it. Besides, there’s a table outside that’s open. And so what if it looks like there’s a storm on the way and that’s the only table without an umbrella? He turns to glare at Erica for trying to make him be nice, but the movement catches the woman’s attention and she stares him down.

“Be _nice_ ,” Erica hisses, stopping by to deliver a hot scone to the couple in the table next to his.

Sure enough, the woman is making her way over him, and Stiles scrambles to move his books before she sits on them, because she seems like the kind of person to disregard that sort of thing when she’s on a mission. And she’s walking towards him like she’s on a mission.

“Thank you so much,” the woman says breezily, and Stiles folds his paper in half before she can set her coffee down on the corner. “You’re so kind, the sheriff’s son, aren’t you?”

This is his third month ever in the town, and it’s been a year since he left. People don’t recognize him as the sheriff’s son unless he’s out with his dad, and even then the first guess is that he’s probably a teenager that’s being brought into the station. So he starts a little bit and nods before introducing himself. “Yeah, uh, yes. Hi, I’m Stiles.”

She smiles at him and extends her hand, shaking his while saying, “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Natalie Martin, I teach at the high school. I’m friends with your father. We met last summer, my daughter threw a party that he busted while I was out of town. Mother of the year award, you know.” With a slight laugh of genuine humor, she brushes back a hair that hadn’t even been out of place. 

Stiles barely manages to contain a snort, because he remembers his dad telling him about it over breakfast the next morning. It’d been a last shebang kind of thing for the senior class apparently, and the neighbors had put in a call around three in the morning when it’d gotten too much to bear. “Well, if your friends with my father, you can’t be too bad.” He tries to remember his dad even mentioning a woman named Natalie, but it’s not coming up. A woman his father isn’t telling him about? He files the information away for later.

“I’m glad you think so. Now, I think he mentioned you’re going to start your second year of college? At Yale, he never told me that.” The last part Natalie says quietly, to herself, and Stiles wonders how she knew before remembering that he’s wearing a shirt with the logo. “That’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful.”

“Thank you,” he says, wondering how much longer he’ll have to keep talking before he’s allowed to go back to his crossword. There are only five clues left, and he’s put two hours in on it now, he needs to finish it or else it’s a blow to his pride. Leaning forward with his pen, he tries to read the next clue.

Dabbing at her mouth with a napkin, Natalie tells him, “My daughter is the same year as you, actually.” At his intrigued look, she tilts her head back and laughs, “Oh, not at Yale of course.”

Of course. Stiles tries to suppress a small triumphant feeling at that, because he’s still impressed that even he managed to get into Yale. And not everyone gets into Yale. 

“She’s at MIT, stayed over the summer to start research with a professor,” she continues, stirring another pack of sugar into her coffee, and Stiles almost chokes on his own tongue.

Not what he’d been expecting after learning she threw the rager his dad still talks about, all things being considered. He’d considered going to MIT, but he wants to be a lawyer, and a degree from MIT going towards law school just sounded weird. “That’s very impressive,” he says honestly. 

Natalie smiles, the smile of a mother who’s proud of her daughter’s achievements and is still getting used to how big they are. “She’s very impressive. Pursuing a double major in electrical engineering and applied mathematics because she couldn’t decide which she wanted to do more, it took days for her to decide on both. Almost waited until the application deadline had passed because she didn’t want to come across as too ambitious.”

Double majors are ambitious. He’s majoring in political science and minoring in biology, and a double major is tempting and terrifying at the same time. “Wow,” he says, because there’s not much else to do.

She takes out her phone, scrolling through a few pictures on her camera roll before coming to one that she smiles at, turning her phone to face him as she preens a little bit. “This is from when I went to visit her while the high school was on spring break.” In the image, a strawberry blonde who looks like a younger Natalie is leaning against a sign that says Museum of Science, a large smile on her lips.

She’s very pretty, the type of pretty that almost catches him off guard for a moment. It’s the kind of look he expects from the girl at the head of the social food chain in high schools, but Stiles doesn’t hear ‘double major in electrical engineering and applied mathematics’ and think that type of pretty, and, yes, he definitely needs to be slapped for that, wow, that’s really offensive. And then he looks up to see how Natalie has her lips pursed with the smallest of smiles on them, and that’s what makes him realize.

His father’s friend is trying to set him up with her daughter. And, granted, her daughter is very pretty and clearly intelligent, but Stiles is close to twenty years old and he can get his own dates. He does get his own dates, actually, not that any of them have ever really worked out, but they were still dates that he got for himself.

He takes his hand off the phone and passes it back to her, trying to smile in a way isn’t overly interested. Not offensive, exactly, but he doesn’t need to encourage her in this endeavor. Around them, people are beginning to trickle out of the Starbucks, leaving tables open that Natalie could move into if she wanted to.

Flipping to another picture, Natalie makes it clear that she doesn’t want to. “She really knows her way around the city, she showed me all of these cute underground book stores and Chinese restaurants.”

Stiles hasn’t told her that underground Chinese restaurants are his weakness, but from the look on her face she somehow already knows. Which is mildly terrifying, but it’s broad daylight in a public place and the most threatening thing she’s done so far is insist that he look at photos of her daughter.

As she comes to the last picture on her trip (her and her daughter hugging each other at the airport), Natalie sets down her phone and a wicked gleam enters her eyes. “You know, Yale and MIT aren’t that far from each other. Two hours or so, isn’t that right?” From the look on her face she knows that she’s right, but Stiles nods along anyway, already guessing as to where this is going. “Sometimes I think the move was hard on her. She has friends, but she’s always been a high strung girl, and I just worry. A familiar face might do her some good.”

Stiles smiles weakly, because he’s never met this girl. He’s not a familiar face, and frankly, traveling two hours to spend time with a girl he’s never met sounds just about like the creepiest thing he’s ever heard. “I’m sure that she keeps busy with research and her friends, like you said.” Somehow, he can already tell this won’t put an end to the discussion.  
With slightly narrowed eyes, Natalie taps her nails against the side of her mug gently. It shouldn’t sound as intimidating as it does. “What are you planning on doing after graduation?”

Finally, conversation back to where he can handle it. “I’m going to go to law school to be a defense attorney. Dad was the one who got me hooked on the idea, talking about people who were innocent having to spend their lives in jail. I don’t think I could live with myself if didn’t try to do something to change it.” It’s a spiel that’s only semi-practiced, but with any luck she won’t call him out on it.

She nods with a predatory smile. “Why don’t I give you her number? Yale is probably starting back soon, and Lydia needs an unbiased source to tell her that I don’t spend my life micromanaging hers. You should give her a call.”

To Stiles, it sounds exactly like Natalie is micromanaging her daughter’s life. “Really, it’s fine. I think, uh, Lydia, is probably reassured with exactly what you tell her.”  
“I’m a mother, it’s my job to look out for her best interest.” When it’s clear that Stiles isn’t going to take her phone with her daughter’s contact information, she reaches across the table and picks up his phone.

He watches, a little in awe, as she slides her fingers across to unlock it and then adds a new contact. “Her name is Lydia Martin. Like I said, she’s about to be a second year at MIT. Now I’ll tell her that you’re going to give her a call so she can be mad at me, wait at least a day to make sure she doesn’t snap at you as well. She can be a bit of a firecracker, but I guess that comes from my side of the family.” Sliding his phone back to him, she picks up her mug and slings her purse over her shoulder. “It was so nice meeting you, Stiles. Have a good day.”

Stiles echoes the sentiment as he looks down at his phone in shock. The small part of him in awe is still there, trying to figure out whether he should be impressed or scared. The contact name ‘Lydia Martin’ stares up at him, and he closes the app and tries to remember to ask his dad just how crazy the people in this town are.

Going back to his crossword, he returns to twenty seven down on a bit of a whim. Something that Natalie said is sticking with him. An eleven letter synonym for ‘bomb’ and ‘live wire’. He picks up his pen and counts out the letters to make sure that everything matches up before he commits and puts it down. Firecracker. He writes the letters down carefully, and they fall in place like they were meant to.

**Author's Note:**

> Lydia-centric part coming soon!


End file.
